The documentation <https://docs.python.org/dev/library/io.html#io.IOBase> says “. . . calling any method (even inquiries) on a closed stream is undefined. Implementations may raise ValueError”. So IMO you shouldn’t rely on any particular success or failure behaviour of these methods when a stream is closed.

Having the stream methods waste time calling out to Python methods and descriptors like readable() and “closed” all the time can make things unnecessarily slow and inefficient (see my work at the end of Issue 18003 for example). On the other hand, removing the existing checks could potentially break someone’s code. I suggest closing this, unless someone has a specific proposal or reason to change.